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Byte56♦Dec 9 '12 at 16:01

1 Answer
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All of the engines you've listed are or already contain real-time renderers, because that is what a game engine must contain, by definition. A game must run at a framerate of at least 24 frames per second (for the perception of smooth motion), and for more intense, action filled games, that framerate requirement goes up to 60. Those framerates are synonymous with real-time.

The alternative to real-time is offline rendering, in which frames may take anywhere from one second to hours to render, and are recorded and then played back at a real-time rate. This is not suitable for games because of the need for interactivity.

If you are really interested in starting low-level and creating a small engine, then you would want to start with OpenGL. Trying to add features to already hefty engines like Panda3D can be difficult without a solid background in game engine architecture. That said, though, I would still recommend starting higher-level, with something like Unity, simply to familiarize yourself with already existing engines, and to help formulate ideas for the architecture and functionality of your own engine you'd like to create.

Well.. there are types of games which commonly use pre-rendered graphics, with their "real-time rendering" consisting solely of drawing those pre-rendered graphics to the screen. And if you want to get into the really interesting rendering techniques, the original version of The Sentinel performed a single panoramic 3D render after each move, and the real-time "looking around" portion of gameplay was actually just panning around on that render. But yeah, modern game engines will all provide real-time rendering.
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Trevor PowellDec 9 '12 at 6:55

@MaikKlein There is a reason why global illumination is done via offline rendering... If you decide to embark on making it real-time, I can say with certainty that your project will be much more complex than a "little engine." Game engines take shortcuts like baked lightmaps for specific reasons.
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ktodiscoDec 9 '12 at 19:01